bertrando sharing hypothesis with the clients

Hypotheses are dialogues: sharing hypotheseswith clients

Paolo Bertrandoa and Teresa Arcellonia

The use of systemic hypotheses in therapy has been criticized on theground that it promotes the expert position of the therapist and tends tounderplay the role of the client in the therapeutic process. In this article,we propose to view the systemic hypothesis as a collaborative action,involving the dialogue between therapists and clients. This interactivehypothesis is created by the very interaction of all participants in thetherapeutic dialogue, and as such it may be considered a dialogue in itself.The article articulates a way of hypothesizing that is consistent with bothsystemic and dialogic premises, and presents some examples of theprocess in action.

The systemic hypothesis is but one example of a process which isprobably universal in therapy: the process of making sense of whathappens both within the therapeutic encounter and in the lives ofclients (see Frank and Frank, 1991). In the pages that follow, we willdeal mostly with this kind of therapeutic hypothesis, which shows anumber of distinctive features. The most important is that, accordingto the concept of systemic hypothesis proposed by the original MilanTeam, it is impossible to know the reality of a person or a family. Wemay just make a hypothesis about it, which ‘is, per se, neither true norfalse, it is simply either more or less useful’ (Selvini Palazzoli et al.,1980, p. 215). Although we still use the hypothesizing process in ourclinical practice, the sense we give to hypotheses, and the very way offormulating them, has undergone a change. The extent and origins ofsuch a change are the subject of this article.

Ezio, or the hypothetical partner

Our way of hypothesizing changed for two main reasons, one ethicaland the other practical. We would like to give an example of the

r The Association for Family Therapy 2006. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 GarsingtonRoad, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.Journal of Family Therapy (2006) 28: 370–3870163-4445 (print); 1467-6427 (online)

a Episteme Centre, Turin, Italy

Corresponding address: Paolo Bertrando, MD, Ph.D., Piazza S.Agostino, 22, 20123 Milan, Italy.E-mail: [email protected].

r 2006 The Authors. Journal compilation r 2006 The Association for Family Therapy and Systemic Practice

former reason, through a clinical encounter, which happened duringa training course in systemic therapy held by one of us.

The encounter with Ezio comes from aborted couple therapy: hiswife declined to participate, and the result was an individual therapycentred on a couple problem, although according to Ezio: ‘Theproblem it’s me . . . my difficult disposition.’ Apparently, Ezio isburdened by such a huge responsibility. He is tense and restless,playing unceasingly with his wedding ring while he asks for ‘advice’about what he should do. Divorce? Reconcile? Stay together for hisdaughter’s sake? Cohabitate with his wife as ‘separated at home’? Thetherapists – two women in training – ask hypothetical questions aboutthe future, about the characteristics a woman with whom he wouldlike to share his life should have. ‘I would like her . . . to be single’,answers Ezio, a little puzzled. Behind the mirror, the atmosphere isred hot. The therapeutic team, mostly constituted of young femaletrainees, cannot restrain its indignation towards this 40-year-old manwith such a scarce consideration of women.

The idea emerges, however, that our client is emotionally blocked,and that the block is now extending to the therapists. We decide thatthe female teacher (the second author) will enter the therapy room inorder to ‘embody the emotions’. She enters and sits beside a surprisedEzio, almost turning her back on the two colleagues. Ezio, bewilderedbut interested, listens to her: ‘Behind the mirror,’ she says, ‘we werestruck by the non-motives you talked about. It is like there were someemotional knots you put aside, substituting for them something morerational. How do you feel with those knots? We feel a strong sufferingyou hardly talk about . . . you say you married a woman you werenever very involved with . . . maybe your wife helps you to dampenyour emotion and suffering. Our prejudice is that a man always looksfor something in a woman, but maybe for you it is too painful to saywhat you were looking for in your wife?’ Ezio is more and morepuzzled. His eyes go from one woman to the other in the room, as ifhe cannot understand the supervisor’s point.

In the discussion behind the mirror, we feel the need to share withEzio the process that dictated the intervention. Without such asharing, the therapy appears incomplete to everybody. A colleaguesays: ‘It is like we laid an ambush for him. That’s not fair, he mustknow our intentions!’ We decide that the teacher will go back to Ezio,together with the two therapists, to tell him openly that, with herpresence, she was supposed to ‘embody the emotions’ in order tobring into the room the parts of his stories which for some reason he

Hypotheses are dialogues 371


tended to omit. Ezio listens attentively to these words; then, with somerelief, he says: ‘A kind of shock therapy, isn’t it?’

What happened here tended to happen more and more frequently.The idea was that unveiling the whole hypothesizing process to clientscould make the power balance between therapists and clients moreethical, solving, at the same time, some stuck situations as the one wepresented here. The training context was instrumental in bringingforth the change, because trainees tend to be extremely attentive tothe unfolding of interactions between therapists and clients.

Gradually, this way of working spread in our everyday practice,because it also responded to a practical need, especially for individualtherapy. And this process led us to a further step, which is sharing thehypothesizing process with the clients at the moment it happens. Butto fully understand such evolution, we must first turn to the relation-ship between the hypothesis and therapeutic dialogue and to thedifferent versions of it.

The therapist and her hypothesis

First of all, we think it is impossible not to have hypotheses within anydialogue, especially if the conversation deals with a certain problem.As semiologist Charles Sanders Peirce (1931–1958) puts it, we tend tocreate hypotheses when confronted with something difficult to under-stand. When something does not fit with our frame of reference, webuild a hypothesis in order to deal with it. Peirce calls this process‘abduction’. Not all hypotheses are the same, though. We can distin-guish, first, between ontological and relational hypotheses: the firstones refer to the being of individuals, the second ones to the relation-ship between them (e.g. one person may be considered ‘aggressive’,or her aggressive behaviour may be considered within its interper-sonal context). We choose to call ontological hypotheses ‘ideas’, leavingthe term ‘hypothesis’ to relational ones. Another distinction is betweenexplicative and process hypotheses. We may say that the former refersto ‘why’, the latter to ‘how’ (see Rober, 2002). In systemic therapy,which is the field of our clinical work, the therapist should ideallyformulate relational and process hypotheses, although it is impossibleto abstain completely from ontological and explicative ones.

Another distinction concerns the use of hypotheses within thedialogue. Everybody, in a dialogue, has a point of view, and tends toallow that point of view to enter the discourse (the world) of the other.We can say, thus, that it is impossible to enter a dialogue without ideas

372 Paolo Bertrando and Teresa Arcelloni


or hypotheses. Even within the most open dialogue, the speakersstrive to confirm their hypotheses, consciously or not. In a therapeuticdialogue, this interplay between discourses can have very differentcharacteristics. Some therapists use their hypotheses in order to drivethe conversation, trying to steer in a predefined direction. Others usetheir hypotheses to open the conversation, introducing and stressingdifferences. The first position was prevalent in the early years ofsystemic therapies, the second in later years. In a way, the evolution ofsystemic therapy is the evolution in the role of hypotheses.

Strategic therapists had explicative hypotheses, considered asapproximations to actual reality (Haley, 1976; Selvini Palazzoli et al.,1978). Although the hypothesis of the early Milan team (SelviniPalazzoli et al., 1980) was explicative, it was also provisional, ‘neithertrue or false’, without any possibility of reading the actual ‘reality’ of afamily or client. In Luigi Boscolo’s and Gianfranco Cecchin’s versionof the Milan hypothesis (see Boscolo et al., 1987), it becomes a processhypothesis, derived from team interaction, but it remains secret: theteam builds up an explanation that must stay secret in order to ‘cure’.The therapist presents herself as a person who knows but does not say.Clients react to an intervention based on a hypothesis, and not directlyto the hypothesis (which, to them, remains unknown). The systemichypothesis belongs solely to the therapeutic team.

Tom Andersen (1987), introducing his reflecting team, makes acrucial move in the evolution of the therapeutic dialogue. For thefirst time ever, the therapeutic team opens to clients its sanctasanctorum leaving secrecy behind. The team dialogue becomesopen, while the process of listening comes to the forefront. Listeningto each other, all the actors in the double dialogue become morerespectful, and abandon the tendency to immediate action thatsystemic therapy had inherited from its strategic predecessors. Inthe public discussion of the team, the tone of comments changes. Thetherapists become more respectful towards clients, and, at the sametime, more ready to acknowledge the positive aspects of the presentedsituations. Such a practice, though, leads to an eclipse of the hypo-thesis. Within the reflecting team, therapists talk, discuss, but do nottry to build systemic hypotheses. They offer, mostly, opinions aboutwhat clients said, with the aim of making them feel understoodand legitimized, putting forward different points of view. Accordingto Andersen: ‘One way to achieve this was to avoid to have anyideas beforehand. Hypotheses were omitted if possible’ (Andersen,1991, p. 13).



Conversational therapists (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992; Ander-son, 1997) are the most straightforward followers of the postmodernimperative: give voice to clients and diminish the (hierarchical)differences between them and the therapist. Conversational therapyeliminates both hypothesizing process and team discussion, andtheorizes a ‘not-knowing’ position for the therapist. This is a seminalinnovation,1 but it has sometimes been interpreted (even against theiroriginators’ intention) as an exhortation to the therapist to abstainfrom any definite idea or hypothesis.

Probably most reflecting team and conversational therapists areaverse to hypotheses because they consider hypotheses as strategicinstruments to drive the client in a pre-established direction, and atthe same time a way of defining a presumably ‘objective’ reality onceand for all. We believe, instead, that a hypothesis can be used that way,but that it can also be used – as we use it – as a way to create aconversational field, where the main subject is relationships. Ourhypotheses tend to be process hypotheses, related to how (in whichkind of possible world) the issues presented in the dialogue exist.Hypotheses of this kind do not close the dialogue finding a cause anda problem-solving strategy, but rather they open it, although withsome limits: they select some discourse fields rather than others. Forexample, systemic hypotheses tend to create relational discourses, andit may sometimes be better to abandon them and use non-systemichypotheses instead.

Hypotheses, teams, dialogues

How can the hypotheses be articulated in the therapeutic dialogue?To understand this, we must keep in mind two dimensions: settingand process. From the point of view of setting, the issue is theseparation between therapeutic (i.e. therapist–client) dialogue andteam dialogue. From the point of view of process, the issue is whetheror not to use ideas and hypotheses (or, better, to do it explicitly).

In the classic systemic model, the dialogue between therapist andclient is separated from the dialogue within the therapeutic team.Therapists are not only allowed to make hypotheses, they are advisedand even forced to make them, but strictly within the team dialogue.

1 Although the historically minded reader could find in it echoes of Laing’s anti-psychiatry (Laing, 1968), Italian critical psychiatry (Basaglia, 1968), and, on different grounds,of Carl Rogers’ client-centred approach (see Anderson, 2001).



Clients are not allowed to participate in the team dialogue or to listendirectly to the hypotheses as such. The one-way mirror is a barrierthat only the active therapist can trespass, going back and forth, actingas intermediary between team and clients. Here the mirror is, aboveall, a metaphor – the important thing is the ‘inner’ mirror, which thesystemic therapist cannot, or does not want to, relinquish.

In comparison, the reflecting team model involves two distinctdialogues (one between the active therapist and the clients, anotheramong the observers) but there is no direct communication betweenthe two sides of the mirror, since the active therapist always stays in thetherapy room. When the observers talk among themselves, the clientsand the therapist can only listen and, conversely, when they dialogue,the observers stay silent. The clients listen to the observing team’swords, as, in classic systemic therapy, they listen to the therapist’s finalintervention. The difference is that they listen to a discussion insteadof an intervention devised behind the mirror. They may afterwardsreflect on the team’s reflections, but they never can participate in them –in other words, they cannot alter the course of the dialogue. From thepoint of view of process, these therapists make a considerable effort inorder not to start from preconceived ideas or hypotheses.

In the conversational model, there are no mirrors. There is just onedialogue between therapist(s) and client(s) where no hypothesis isformulated and the therapist just ‘keeps open the conversation’(Anderson and Goolishian, 1988). Apparently, to be on an equalfooting with the client, the therapist should not have ideas – especiallyin the form of definite hypotheses – which could influence clients or‘suggest’ to them what to do.2 What we find problematic in such aposition is the possibility for the therapist, in this open dialoguestance, not to have hypotheses. We could say that the therapist needsto build a sort of inner mirror in order not to see the ideas andhypotheses she is unwittingly constructing.

Our goal is to eliminate the separateness of dialogues (the real andmetaphoric mirrors), while at the same time keeping the hypothesiz-ing process. This we try to obtain by sharing our hypotheses with theclients. What emerges in the therapist’s mind is shared with the clientin the very moment of its emergence. This means that clients becomemore active in directing the course of therapy. This has radical

2 Rober (2002) brings back the hypothesis in conversational therapy, but refers just to the‘inner dialogue’ of the therapist – the hypothesis cannot be an issue to discuss betweentherapists and clients.



consequences in the relationship between therapists and clients, fromthe point of view not only of ethics, but also of the therapeutic process.

This means, in fact, that within the therapeutic conversation ahypothesis emerges that I, as therapist, suggest on the basis of someelement provided by the clients. Then I, together with the clients,improve it, until the final hypothesis (if it emerges) becomes a sortof common heritage for all of us. What emerges from this processis still a hypothesis, not a truth, for both clients and therapists. Thisis the main difference from an analytical interpretation, which isgrounded in a firm authority principle.3

By co-evolving hypotheses in this way, the client could learn (ordeutero-learn, following Bateson, 1942) a systemic way of reasoning.

We may well define this kind of hypothesis as a dialogical hypo-thesis; that is, a hypothesis which lives and exists as a dialogue. Thehypothesis does not follow from the dialogue, it is the dialogue (and viceversa). In systemic individual therapy (see Boscolo and Bertrando,1996), when I build my hypothesis together with the client, I amteaming up with her, as if we are a reflecting team without other fellowtherapists. In other words, I pass from one side of the mirror to theother. Although the client is asked to be very active in the hypothesiz-ing process, it is still the therapist who should have an idea of how tolead the dialogue (I should have some idea, as far as possible, of what Iam doing and where I am going). We could summarize the change bysaying that in the beginning we, as systemic therapists, had a real teamwith us; then, we had an internalized team (Boscolo et al., 1995); today,we team up with our clients.

The hypothesis is a dialogue

A hypothesis may catalyse possibilities for evolution when the hy-pothesizing process happens within a therapeutic frame. But how issuch a frame defined? Or, better, what is the difference between atherapeutic dialogue and a commonplace, everyday conversation? Wemight say that the very definition of a therapeutic relationship is thetherapeutic frame. A therapy is a therapy because it is defined by arelationship where the rules of everyday relationship are suspended(Bertrando, 2006). What makes a therapy a therapy is exactly thespecificity of the conditions of a non-everyday dialogue.

3 For the concept of psychoanalytical interpretation, see Laplanche and Pontalis (1967).For its use in transference analysis, see Gill (1982), Bertrando (2002). For some transcribedexamples, see Gill and Hoffman (1982).



The therapeutic dialogue, however, is also an everyday dialogue. Ifit were not, what happens within the therapeutic frame would be realonly within that frame, and would not be transferred ‘outside’ (in‘real’ life). We may say that a therapy is only successful when whatemerges within its frame is somewhat transferred to life outside thetherapy room. But the therapeutic frame, in turn, is not born in avoid. The actors of the therapeutic dialogue, namely therapists andclients, bring their own respective ways of framing their worlds to theconversation. Thus therapy is an encounter of frames, the onebrought by the therapist and the one brought by the client, becauseall human beings live in a world made predictable by the rules definedby a frame, but creativity and novelty may emerge only by goingoutside of the known frames.

Cultural stability depends upon shared rules and frames, and if the rulesand frames are shared there will be no change. If the rules and framesare not shared, there can be no communication. On the other hand, thetwo person do not operate in vacuo and it is therefore possible thatoperating upon shared rules and frames they reach a point at which theystub their toes upon the environment. The rules and frames may than becalled in question. Moreover, two persons operating with discrepantsystem of rules and/or discrepant frames, may be so frustrated in theirattempts to communicate that the rules of one or both person areultimately called in question.

(Bateson, 1953)

The above statement may not necessarily apply however, becausedifferent frames are successfully shared. If they are not, building realsystemic hypotheses becomes impossible. It is easier to organize ideasin hypotheses if we develop the ability to listen to what our inter-locutors have to say. Indeed, it is impossible to organize them whenthe interlocutors are deaf to each other. We often see such a process inthe teamwork of very inexperienced systemic trainees. Rather thanhypotheses, it is easy to hear gossip or individual bravura pieces thatare not caught by anybody else and can hardly coalesce into hypo-theses.

In this sense, any real systemic hypothesis is a dialogue. A therapistwho builds hypotheses on her own relies on her inner dialogue(see Rober, 2002). But the inner dialogue is in itself monodic ratherthan polyphonic. The different voices of the inner dialogue alwaystend to be fused in one single voice which will originate ideas(ontological hypotheses) rather than relational hypotheses. Here, to



share and discuss our own hypotheses with the clients – whileaccepting, of course, the clients’ hypotheses – means to open ourframe, accepting that the language (the world) of the other will enterinto ours.

According to Mikhail Bakhtin (1935/1981), the world of language(or, better, of languages) is characterized by a twofold dimension. Inany time and place, there is a centripetal force that drives languagetowards unification and uniformity. At the same time, however, acentrifugal force exists that leads to a condition Bakhtin names‘heteroglossia’ (raznorecie), that is to say the co-presence of differentlanguages: ‘A diversity of social speech types (sometimes even diver-sity of languages) and a diversity of individual voices. . . this internalstratification [is] present in any language at any given moment of itshistorical existence’ (Bakhtin, 1935/1981, pp. 262–263).

Heteroglossia guarantees the vitality of languages, which are aliveonly in dialogue, and would die (become still and fruitless) inuniformity. The important thing is ‘dialogization’, which means,rather than a dialogue between persons, a dialogue between differentlanguages (which, to Bakhtin, means different conceptions andexperiences of the world). This constitutes not a unity, but a poly-phony of speech genres, where speech genres concern the differentsocial groups, the ways of speaking and writing, the idiosincraticindividual discourses, which give form to shared speech (Bakhtin,1935/1981, pp. 288–289; see also Bakhtin, 1986).

We may define our therapy as ‘dialogic’ only if the therapeuticconversation acquires the characteristics of dialogue according toBakhtin (see also Seeikkula, 2003); that is, a polyphonic cohabitationof different discourses and different visions, from which possibly anew vision (a new language) may emerge, but where the difference ofdiscourses is accepted anyway. The striving to persuade the inter-locutor to accept my point of view is substituted with the nurture of anactive understanding on his part, in the sense that anything that is saidis assimilated by the listener in a new conceptual system.

The speaker strives to get a reading on his own word, and on his ownconceptual system that determines this word, within the alien conceptualsystem of the understanding receiver; he enters into dialogical relation-ship with certain aspects of this system. The speaker breaks through thealien conceptual horizon of the listener, constructs his own utterance onalien territory, against his, the listener’s, apperceptive background.

(Bakhtin, 1935/1981, p. 282)



The therapist not only works on the relationships the client isembedded in, but also on her inner dialogue (or her ability to havean inner dialogue). For the client who is stuck in her ideas andexplanations, the hypothesis organizes such ideas through a dialoguewith the therapist, thus also allowing the development of her owninner dialogue. This means that sharing hypotheses with clients maybe necessary, in systemic individual therapy, because the client is theonly possible interlocutor, and she may cure us of solipsism – aprofessional malaise which all therapists risk.

Although in distinct spheres, Bateson and Bakhtin raise a similarproblem; that is, how can we evade the tendency to uniformity andrepetition? One solution is dialogue. This is why the hypothesis, aconstitutive part of the therapeutic dialogue, should enter explicitlyinto the conversation. It is necessary that the visions and experiencesof the world of therapist and client can meet, maybe even clash, andbring forward the emergence of novelty not completely guided(submitted to conscious purpose) by the one, nor by the other.4 ‘Notknowing’ may thus become ‘knowing together’. Of course, thetherapist must be aware, within this process, of her responsibility(Bianciardi and Bertrando, 2002), of her unavoidable position withina power system (Foucault, 2003; White, 1995; see also Guilfoyle(2003) for an analysis of power in dialogical therapy), of her pre-judices (Cecchin et al., 1994). Here a substantial difference remainsbetween therapist and client. The latter may well be unaware of allthese dimensions, especially at the beginning of therapy. However, thedialogical work around her hypotheses and those of her therapist maymake her aware of prejudices, positions, emotion, which she did notknow beforehand, took for granted, or did not fully understand.

A clinical case: Diana

Diana, 33, is an architect who works for a public agency. An only childand single, she lives with her parents,5 and has an official fiance,Maurizio, although she has rather frequent affairs with other men.She has been in therapy with the first author for almost a year, forwhat she defines as her inability to feel emotion, to be deeply moved

4 For a criticism of conscious purpose, see Bateson (1968a, 1968b), and Harries-Jones(1995).

5 Such a condition is rather common in Italy, where this therapy was conducted, and it isnot to be considered an anomaly, as it would probably be in most Anglo-Saxon countries.



by something, to feel her own desires. More than once, to thetherapist’s question: ‘What do you really want?’ she has answered: ‘Idon’t know, if I knew I would not be here.’ She is a ‘good client’, alwayspunctual for her hour, but every time she appears distressed, because,she states, she has absolutely nothing to say. During the therapy, thetherapist tackled her emotional anaesthesia, connecting it to herrelationship with her parents, a couple she perceived as cold butunstable, needing her calm, unemotional presence to stay together.

During an encounter in an advanced phase of the therapy, Dianaputs some themes on the table. She has to decide whether to accept apossible house to rent or whether to go and live with Maurizio, whoappears, as usual, not to be convinced of her commitment to him.Diana insists on her general difficulty in making a choice. Her feelingof unsteadiness surfaces, together with her reflections about herrelationship with her fiance, and the feeling of a connection betweenher reaction to Maurizio’s proposals and her past experience with herparents. This is not a clear-cut hypothesis, but rather a dim idea ofhow she feels. We will now offer a transcription of a lengthy part of thesession, leaving our comments for later.

Diana [D]: Well, I was thinking about an image from my childhood.There are scenes I remember with my mother. My mother has threesisters, so I grew up with my cousins, their siblings. I remember, well,it was not a class thing, but when there was a birthday, there was alittle party, etcetera, and my mother had this ability of making mehave something different from them, the presents, the party, and Ihated not being the same as my cousins. Sometimes I hated herpresence, a real broody hen, though I was with my aunts, my cousins,when we went around. I remember some red slacks, that my mother toldone of my aunts to buy for my birthday, because she liked them, and Iwas wondering why I could not receive the same things, the samepresents as my cousins. This feeling of being different, because mymother . . .

Therapist [T]: You mean . . . ? The same things, for example, what?

D: Toys, nothing special. But the fact is, my mother made me feeldifferent, because she said they had to give me those red slacks instead of. . . other things. It was irritating. I am starting to think about thoseyears, now. She seemed convinced that she knew me, I don’t know . . .

T: I feel it wasn’t that your mother was convinced she knew you, but thatshe was convinced she knew better than you what was good for you. This



is the common factor in all the three episodes you told me [in previoussessions]. In all of them, it was the same: I know it’s better for you not tobecome a professional swimmer, I know you have to study every day, andI know what’s the colour you like for your trousers.

D: Sure! It’s a continuing . . . [pause]

T: Apparently, apart from how your mother really was as a person, whatshe left in your memory is this thing of not being able to understand you.And to be convinced, instead, that she could understand you perfectly,that she could decide in your place. On the one hand, every time youthink about it, you get mad at your mother, on the other . . .

D: There was this photo of the two of us on the couch, and I still remem-ber how much I was nervous, at that time, because I didn’t want to do it.My mummy, instead, loved to take pictures on the beach, or at birth-days parties, etcetera. I remember making a comment about it someyears ago, when we were watching these pictures, taken when I was 6 or7: ‘Mummy, do you know how I hated to be photographed?’ When I saythis kind of thing, she’s always taken aback, because she doesn’t under-stand. She didn’t understand and she didn’t see my point, and maybe Iwonder whether it was me, the person incapable of transmitting myopinion, my advice. Maybe I accepted it all, I remained silent, and shehad good reasons to believe that I agreed. This is the implication, this iswhy the anger is always directed towards her, because she was thinkingthings, and believing she knew my taste, or . . . and, on the other hand,the anger towards myself, because when this kind of thing happens atwork, afterwards I say to myself: ‘Why didn’t I say it, why didn’t I do it,why didn’t I express it?’ But I know that I’m stuck with that sort ofinternal block, and I can’t.. . .

T: Here the common factor between what you tell about the past andwhat you tell about the present is that you are blocked. There are thesethings and you don’t speak for yourself. In the past, I don’t hear yourvoice very much, I hear your mother’s.

D: Sure, and it’s the same today. My feeling is, if I manage to saysomething, usually it’s whispered. I don’t speak up, I ask for approval.Yes, generally, this is my approach. I can’t discuss, I whisper. Evenwhen I know that the person on the other side is wrong, if he tellsme ‘No, it’s like this and this and this’, I can’t. I won’t say I don’t havethe strength, but . . . I don’t know what I lack inside. This createssome problems at work, because afterwards they tell me: ‘Why didn’t



you tell him?’ There are things that I should say, but . . . they don’t comeout.

T: Why couldn’t you react against your mother? You were not afraid ofyour mother, I feel, the thing’s different. I was wondering (I make myfantasies, then you tell me if they make sense) . . . I was trying to puttogether this and what you told me about your family at the very beginningof your therapy: everything was centred around your father, he was thedisturbing figure for you. . . . Now, why did your father make thingsdifficult, more for your mother than for you? My idea is, if you had toprotect your mother at any cost, then you couldn’t possibly confront her.

D: But that happened afterwards!

T: Afterwards chronologically?

D: Yes, sure, because there . . . today we’re talking about primary school,maybe the fifth or sixth grade.

T: At primary school there wasn’t this thing with your father?

D: No, sometimes my mother had something to complain about, but itwas nothing special. My father became a burden afterwards, from theninth grade up to secondary school. My parents gave me problems atdifferent times.

T: At different times. But I feel, however, that you had somehow to sup-port your mother, to think she was right. It was a kind of an absolute duty.

D: No. It’s just that my mother had always been more practical, so whenmy father kind of lost his head, it was easier for me to cling to her,because I felt she could hold it all together. Maybe I feel the angercoming now that things are quieter, so I am more detached, I don’t seeher in this role anymore.

T: Maybe this thing, of having to show your solidarity to your mother,because of your father’s disorientation, prevented you from rebellingagainst her afterwards. You never showed rebellion in adolescence. Iwon’t say you should have, but most people do rebel in adolescence. Youhad your reasons not to do it. You gave in as a child, as a young girl, at 15you could not get angry, because there was this other problem, I think . . .

D: Yes, probably I didn’t want to add more problems . . .



T: . . . or you couldn’t. I think it was not a decision on your part. It’s likeyou felt you couldn’t do it. Like it disappeared from your awareness, itnever occurred to you that you could get angry towards your motherbecause she was so coercing.

D: I would say it didn’t even cross my mind at the time. It’s terrible.

T: It didn’t cross your mind, maybe, because at the time it was so vitalthat you and your mother clung to each other . . . how I imagine it, itwasn’t just you clinging to your mother, but both of you clinging to eachother. You gave me the impression that you didn’t see your mother as arock to grasp, but that the two of you were like two logs trying to stayafloat in a fast flowing river.

D: In a sense it’s like that. I didn’t choose. Maybe today, after all theseyears, these memories resurface and they are stronger. If things hadbeen different, when I reached adolescence I would have started toassert myself . . . I said to myself: ‘What’s the use in saying anything?’since she didn’t get anything . . . so I accepted. But now I startremembering it all . . .

T: It’s as if today, after talking a lot about it, you allow yourself toremember things that hurt you, but that have been buried for a longtime, that did not cross your mind straightaway.

D: No, my father was the most immediate, the most obvious problem.My mother, for better or worse, has always been a stronger point ofreference than my father, and therefore, notwithstanding what I’ve justsaid, she’s always been more of a security.

T: Yes, but, from what you’re saying, after a while she became toostrong a security, too strong a point of reference. It’s like you weresaying, ‘She was too strong a security, and it somehow led me to lose mypersonal bearings. I don’t know where are my points of referenceanymore.’

D: Sure.

T: That’s probable. I think that, for you, the issue is to make peace withthe mother you carry inside you. The actual mother you have now is notso similar anymore to the mother of the past . . . and maybe the motheryou carry inside you was never so alike the mother you had in reality.But you have to settle scores with that one, the one you have inside.



D: How can I do it?

T: You’re doing it already. I think it’s a slow process, you cannot thinkthat one day you remember some things, and those things just snap, andyou’re changed. It’s not like that. You can see, now, how you graduallydiscover or rediscover things that were not obvious at all. It took sometime for you to bring them out.

D: Some memories, sometimes. But it’s not a burden, maybe . . .

T: Maybe you couldn’t see that those memories had strong links to what’shappening to you now. They are not just memories, they are memoriesthat show you some facets of yourself that are still there. Rather thanmemories, they are ways of being with other people that you still have toovercome, and are not so easy to overcome. Maybe some day you willeven be able to talk this over with your mother.

In this dialogue, the therapist has to reorganize his hypothesis. At thebeginning, after the first two exchanges, he tries to organize data hegathered in previous sessions, in order to give some sense both to themother’s behaviour, Diana’s responses, and her present feelings.Since Diana’s first answers are reassuring, the therapist cooperateswith her to improve the hypothesis. The idea is that the mother’s voicebecame so loud it suffocated Diana’s, thus fostering her basic un-certainty about her own feelings. The therapist is quite straightfor-ward in putting forward his hypothesis (‘In the past, I don’t hear yourvoice very much, I hear your mother’s’). Diana not only accepts it, butgoes on and enriches it. Then, the therapist proposes (although in atentative fashion: ‘I make my fantasies, then you tell me if they makesense’) a new hypothesis, to explain why the target of Diana’s anger, inthe entire first part of the therapy, had been her father. This time,Diana contradicts the hypothesis. The triangle hypothesized by thetherapist (Diana who confronted her father to gain support and loveby her extremely demanding mother) does not persuade her. Thetherapist, now, must find something different, some new elements tohelp Diana build a hypothesis that may make sense for her. At thispoint, therapist and client start working together, each of them addinglittle bits of ideas. At last, they agree on a new relational hypothesis.Then, the therapist modifies it slightly in order to retrospectively giveDiana a more active and competent role towards a less powerful andterrible mother. Now Diana can choose what to decide, whether tospeak or stay silent, whether to look for her peace or not. And the



therapist suggests she has already started to choose to rediscover hermemories and give them new meanings.

Conclusions

In the conversation with Diana, the therapist is collaborative andsmooth. He asks many questions, proposes some reframings, butwithout becoming openly directive. This is not necessarily always thestyle of this therapist. With other clients he may be more passive andattentive, or more active and structuring. In a dialogical therapy it isnot the therapist’s style that dictates what happens in the dialogue butthe opposite; that is, the dialogue dictates the therapist’s style withinthat dialogue. If the therapist really participates in the dialogue, anddoes not set it up as a monologue where she tries to impose herself onthe client, or as a monologue of the client’s, where she just listens withsparse comments to what the client has to say, then the dialoguebecomes an environment where the therapist may allow one of anumber of possible styles to come to the surface. The therapist’sdiscourse may blend smoothly with the client’s, as in this case, or maycontrast it. But it is always in a dialogical relationship with the client’sdiscourse, accepting it and its specificity. In this process, a respectfultherapist should not be afraid of her ideas and beliefs. We believe it isindispensable for the therapist to bring himself, what he thinks, andhis hypothesis, within the dialogue, facing dialogically the client’sdiscourse.

So far we have largely discussed individual therapy, and clearly thecontext of a single therapist vis-a-vis a single client favours dialogicalhypotheses. But we believe that also in the more complex context offamily therapy, where a team faces a family, hypotheses may enter thedialogue. This implicates a polyphonic process, and asks of the team(not just the active therapist) some humility and the definitiverejection of any therapeutic omnipotence. If the clients are theexperts of their own stories (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992), thenthey are also the privileged interlocutors for building hypotheses onthose stories.

The final crucial point is that, in this perspective, the therapist must beaware of her own responsibility (Bianciardi and Bertrando, 2002). Thismeans that the therapist is ethically responsible for everything she bringsto the dialogue, and that the fact of participating in the dialogue on equalterms does not erase her responsibility. On the contrary it increases it,because the therapist is responsible for the very reality she tends to build



in the dialogue, and for her role within it. Maybe the responsibility of thetherapist in the dialogical process is to keep open several differenthypotheses, to avoid simple linear explanations, to introduce the ideathat several possibilities exist in the telling of one’s story, and to be opento discuss and accept the client’s responses to this proposal.

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